I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It was one of the few stories we told the same way.
If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.
I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why. I would sit there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun. With Nick, I understood finally. Because he was so much fun. It was like dating a sea otter.
What kind of woman gets slaughtered by her own son?
All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind.
People do what they’re supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation – they’re.
When you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.
But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.
At one point, she probably liked the idea of a daughter. When she was a girl, I bet she daydreamed of being a mother, of coddling, of licking her child like a milk-swelled cat. She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public, was a beloved child.
People judge. Fast.
I’d go out each morning and beg for six hours. I knew who to approach and for how long and exactly what to say. I was never ashamed. What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money.
And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.
I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like.
Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.
Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
This is the hardest part: waiting for stupid people to figure things out.
If you couldn’t find something in thirty seconds, you were losing money, his father always said. Return phone calls immediately was another rule Clay had been taught to obey.
Desi rarely says jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips.
Nick grew up with a father who never ever apologized, so when Nick feels he has screwed up he goes on offense.